Spreadsheet Models for Managers

Getting Access to Spreadsheet Models for Managers

If you use Excel to model businesses, business processes, or
business transactions, this course will change your life. You’ll learn how to create tools for yourself that will amaze
even you. Unrestricted use of this material is available in two ways.

As a stand-alone Web site

It resides on your computer, and you can use it anywhere. No need for Internet access.

At this Web site

If you have access to the Internet whenever you want to view this material, you can purchase on-line access.
Unlimited usage. I’m constantly making improvements and you’ll get them as soon as they’re available.

Apparently, you’re using a browser that has JavaScript disabled. This Web site uses JavaScript, especially for
some of its navigation features. If you want to make those features available, you must enable JavaScript. Please open your browser's
preferences dialog and enable JavaScript at your earliest convenience. Instructions: for Internet Explorer 9.x; for Internet Explorer Version 8.x;Internet Explorer Version 7.x;
for Firefox.

A common question is “How do I know how
to break up the problem? Is there only one way to do the analysis?” The answer is that
breaking up a problem is an art, and there is usually more than one way to do it. The art of
picking a good way takes a while to learn.

Often you want to break up the problem along one set of boundaries for one purpose and along
another set for another purpose. You might want this if the calculations you’re making are
especially easy if the problem is analyzed in a certain way. So there is often no single
right answer to the analysis question.

Array arithmetic in Excel is one of its more powerful capabilities. It’s a way of doing
computations on whole ranges of cells at once, rather than cell-by-cell as most spreadsheet
users do them. It takes a bit of effort to grasp it, but once you have it you’ll feel pretty
good about it. We’ll see several examples of its use in this session and the next one.

The photo shows a prism decomposing (analyzing) white light into its component colors.

To keep a clear view of the forest and avoid focusing only on the trees, remember why we use
matrix multiplication and array arithmetic. Briefly, we use them because we find that it’s
very often helpful to decompose a problem into parts (analysis), then do calculations on the
parts, and finally reassemble the final solution from the results of those partial calculations
(synthesis).

Matrix multiplication and array arithmetic provide us with very convenient methods for
performing those intermediate calculations on the parts. They’re the tools that make analysis
and synthesis so powerful.